Things to Do With Grandkids: 50 Ideas for Ages 0–6

The best things to do with grandkids aren’t outings — they’re jobs. Baking, watering, sorting buttons, washing the car badly: small children would rather do real things beside you than be entertained at. Below are fifty ideas for the ages I know best, birth to six, sorted by age and weather, all tested on my five grandchildren. None require tickets, most require wiping the table afterward, and every one of them works better if you let the child believe it was their idea.

Babies (0–1): you are the activity

Nobody tells you this, but with a baby, you’re the entertainment. Lean into it:

1. Narrated stroller walks — name every dog, truck, and flower like a nature documentary
2. Kitchen-floor concerts with a wooden spoon and a pot
3. Reading anything aloud — the baby doesn’t care if it’s a board book or your grocery list, it’s your voice they’re after
4. Nursery rhymes with hand motions (they never expire)
5. Peekaboo, the game with a 100% five-star rating for eleven months running
6. Tummy-time cheerleading on a quilt in the yard
7. A “texture tour” of the house: velvet cushion, cold window, fuzzy sweater
8. Front-porch weather watching — babies find rain riveting

Toddlers (1–3): give them a job

Toddlers are tiny, drunk apprentices who desperately want employment:

9. Washing plastic dishes at the sink (a chair, a towel on the floor, twenty minutes of peace)
10. “Helping” bake — dumping pre-measured cups counts as baking
11. Watering plants with a small can (refills are half the fun)
12. Sorting the button jar or a muffin tin of big pom-poms
13. Feeding pets with supervision, one scoop at a time
14. Sweeping with a kid-size broom while you sweep
15. Picking cherry tomatoes, the vegetable that tastes like candy when grandma grew it
16. Puddle-stomping in proper boots (bring the towel, skip the lecture)
17. A “car wash” for their ride-on toys with a bucket of suds
18. Sticker “mail” — they decorate envelopes, you send them to their parents
19. The classic: a cardboard box, any size, no instructions

Preschoolers (3–5): projects and pretend

Now you’ve got a co-conspirator with a working imagination:

20. Real baking with real jobs — cracking eggs, kneading, decorating
21. Planting a fast garden: radishes and sunflowers, patience-proof crops
22. Blanket forts with a flashlight and snacks served “room service”
23. Play dough from your own kitchen (flour, salt, oil, food coloring)
24. A backyard scavenger hunt: something red, something crunchy, something tiny
25. Painting rocks to hide along your walking route
26. Tea parties with real (unbreakable) pouring — pouring is the whole point
27. Dress-up from a dedicated grandma costume box: old scarves, hats, clip-on earrings
28. Simple card games — Go Fish teaches numbers and losing gracefully
29. Making bird feeders (pinecone, nut-free butter or lard, seeds)
30. “Restaurant” where they take your order with a notepad and deep seriousness
31. Catching bugs in a jar, admiring, releasing (the releasing is a lesson)
32. Baking cookies for someone — a neighbor, the mail carrier — and delivering them

Fives and sixes: the golden age

Old enough for real skills, young enough to think you’re magic:

33. Cooking a whole simple recipe start to finish, their name on the menu
34. Teaching your actual hobby — knitting, fishing, birdwatching; my full list of grandma hobbies that double as grandkid magnets exists for exactly this
35. Board games with real rules (and real losing — a second-grade teacher insists)
36. A photo walk where they hold the camera and you follow their eye
37. Letter writing or drawing “pen pal” mail between visits
38. Building a birdhouse or anything else involving supervised sandpaper
39. Library trips with their own card — the card is a rite of passage
40. Planting “their” tree or bush and measuring themselves against it each visit
41. Interviewing grandma: they ask about the old days, you tell mostly true stories
42. Starting a collection together — shells, stamps, pressed leaves

Rainy-day rescues (any age)

43. Fort day (see #22, escalate as needed)
44. A “museum” of their artwork, taped up with admission tickets
45. Baking, the weatherproof classic
46. Sock puppets from the orphan-sock basket
47. Old photo albums — small children are obsessed with “was that MY mommy?”
48. An indoor picnic on a quilt, in front of a window, watching the rain lose

Traditions beat outings

49. A special-occasion ritual — mine is Grandparents Day pancakes, shaped like each grandchild’s initial
50. The sleepover — the crown jewel of grandma activities, with its own rules and rhythms; I’ve written the complete sleepover-at-grandma’s checklist so yours goes down in family legend

Here’s the teacherly secret under all fifty: children don’t remember activities, they remember rituals. The same pancake shape, the same button jar, the same walk to the same corner. Repetition is what turns an afternoon into a childhood. Pick five things from this list and do them every single visit — that’s the whole magic trick.

FAQ: things to do with grandkids

What can I do with my grandkids at home?

Give them real jobs beside you: baking, watering plants, washing plastic dishes, sorting buttons. Small children prefer genuine tasks with grandma to being entertained — the work is the play at this age.

What do grandkids like to do with grandparents most?

The same things, repeated. Kids attach to rituals — the pancake shape, the cookie recipe, the walk to the corner — far more than to novel outings. Consistency, not spectacle, builds the memories.

What are cheap activities to do with grandchildren?

Almost everything on this list: forts, play dough, scavenger hunts, puddle walks, baking, the cardboard box. The most-requested activities at my house cost less than a dollar, and the box was free.

How do I entertain grandkids of different ages at once?

Run a “job site”: the baby watches from the high chair, the toddler dumps and stirs, the five-year-old measures and cracks eggs. One project, age-sized jobs — thirty-one years of classroom group work finally paying off.